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November 12, 2009

#sciwri09 tweets, a la Wordle

When Steven Tally (@sciencewriter) of Purdue offered an Excel file of the tweets from ScienceWriters2009 (archived from Purdue's very cool Need4Feed tweet aggregation/analysis tool), my hand shot up and I said, "Me, Me, Me!"

Steven asked if I had anything cool planned. Well, I didn't, but after a few minutes I realized the easiest thing would be to make a word cloud out of the tweets. So, I headed over to Wordle.net. Here's the result:

I limited the tweets to the first two days of the meeting, which included all of the events related to the annual meeting of the National Association of Science Writers. I'll leave creating a word cloud of tweets from the New Horizons meeting (organized by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing, NASW's sister organization) as an exercise for the reader.

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November 11, 2009

Has anyone else checked out TwitterTim.es?

I just received notification that my TwitterTim.es account is ready.


Despite the fact that it took longer than the promised 2 hours to build my "newspaper" (try about a week), it looks pretty cool. You log into TwitterTim.es using Twitter's OAuth functionality (TwitterTim.es doesn't store your password), and you are treated to a nicely organized array of stories courtesy of the links your Twitter followers have posted.


There's also an RSS option, if you'd like to subscribe to your personal newspaper in your favorite reader. 

One nice feature: in addition to listing the names of your friends who shared the links, you also see who among your friends' friends have shared the link as well, which is helpful if you want to expand your follower network:


The retweet button redirects you to Twitter's Web site, and automatically appends "via @twttimes" to your tweet, so if you want to give a hat tip to a follower, you'll need to do it by hand.


Has anyone else had a chance to play with TwitterTim.es?

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Filed under  //   curation   Twitter   TwitterTim.es  

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October 29, 2009

Twitter lists are now activated in my account!

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October 21, 2009

My Google Reader Bundle of Higher Ed PR and Marketing Blogs

Google Reader has become my favorite was to organize my RSS feeds. The Reader team has been rolling out some neat feature enhancements within the last month or so, but there's one feature that's been around since late spring that I'm trying to use more. It's called a bundle.

As described on the Official Google Reader Blog, a bundle is a way to "share your favorite feeds."

I've created a bundle of my current reading list of higher ed PR and marketing blogs. Check it out and, if you like it, subscribe to it. Right now it's a baker's dozen, but I'm always looking for new and interesting things to read. So, if you see something that's not on here that you think should be, let me know. Likewise, if you write a blog that's not on here and you think it should be, let me know about it, too. Don't be shy.

If you subscribe to a lot of RSS feeds like I do, I think bundles could be a great way to curate news.

Check out the Official Google Reader blog to create your own Google Reader bundle.

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Filed under  //   blogs   google reader   higher ed   marketing   pr  

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October 18, 2009

Today's Twitter outage was a great illustration of @physicsdavid's prediction that rssCloud is the next Twitter. Why?

Perhaps RSS will absorb Twitter. That's the idea behind rssCloud. That a lot can be gained by creating a loosely-coupled 140-character network. Sure there will be tradeoffs, it'll take up to a minute for you to see your friends' updates. But there would be a lot of advantages, for example -- while one component of the network can fail, the whole thing is as resilient and distributed as the Internet.
via scripting.com

This morning, Twitter was down for a few hours, apparently due to network connectivity issues:

Responding to network connectivity problems: We are currently investigating a problem whereby some Twitter clients in widely scattered network locations are unable to connect to twitter.com.

Today's outage reportedly did not affect all users, but it definitely hit those of us in Austin for the ScienceWriters 2009 meeting at the University of Texas at Austin. And it illiustrated a point that Symmetry Magazine editor David Harris (@physicsdavid) brought up in a late afternoon session on social media.

During this session, titled "Secret Life of Social Media," Bob Finn (@bobfinn) informed those of us in the room of a tweet from another, concurrent session:

The tweet elicited a few laughs, and David was asked he thought. His answer was the little known rssCloud:

Dave Winer (the guy behind the original RSS and rssCloud) wrote a very good explanation of what rssCloud means to people who use the web. Today's Twitter outage is a timely example of why we need a decentralized twitter. 

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Filed under  //   sciwri09  

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October 17, 2009

Secret Life of Social Media panel

L to R: Cris Russell, Alexis Madrigal, David Harris, Robin Lloyd

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Filed under  //   sciwri09  
Posted from Austin, TX

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October 15, 2009

Proof for @dontgetcaught that we really are testing the camera :)

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Posted from New York, NY

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October 5, 2009

New features for Seesmic Web


We have some great updates to share for Seesmic Web, along with some exciting activities and special thank you's!

Seesmic Web Updates
As we continue to build out Seesmic Web, here are the latest updates. To make sure your changes are working properly, make sure to clear your browser's cache.
Additional languages: We've added additional languages Japanese, Portuguese (Brazil) and Spanish! We especially thank our Teamseesmic translators (see more below!)
Reply-All: Our reply-all feature in Seesmic Desktop was a small but significant improvement that we carried over to Seesmic Web. Save time communicating with your friends by replying to all of the usernames listed in a message. Simply click on the reply arrow to choose "Reply All"

User Interface Improvements: You'll notice some subtle but significant improvements to the Seesmic Web user interface. With changes to the main message bar to post your status updates and an improved reply menu, you'll find Seesmic Web easier to use.

Mr. Tweet Profile: Mr. Tweet is a popular discovery app that helps identify enthusiastic users that are relevant to you. With our partnership, we're starting out with offering a profile tab with statistics and information to better understand your users.

Many thanks for the volunteers for the latest translations @nobsato, @megoka, @elanbeat, @y9216, @iamroberto, @formentera6, @sergei_cl, @garrido, @LGBSP

We've very excited and have a lot more updates coming very soon!

via teamseesmic.com

I've been a huge fan of PeopleBrowsr as a Twitter client for the last several months, but recently I've been spending some time with Seesmic Web. I like Seesmic Web for its simplicity: it's like the Twitter.com Web interface -- a river-style single column of tweets -- but with real-time updates and easy access to follower and friend profiles, among other things.

The Seesmic Web team just announced some new features that I think are going to make it a nice tool for those who doesn't want or need to group their friends. I'm especially happy to see the appearance of a "reply all" feature.

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Filed under  //   seesmic   twitter  

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September 20, 2009

Long Beach, NY, 9-20-2009

   
Click here to download:
Long_Beach_NY_9-20-2009.zip (791 KB)

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Posted from Long Beach, NY

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September 11, 2009

Lose the rear brake

Posterous co-founder Garry Tan has an insightful post today on the joy of minimalism. Garry tells us about his passion for fixed gear bikes and his decision to remove the rear brake from his:

Today, I removed the rear brake. I took off the whole mechanism -- cable, calipers, everything. (I kept the front brake just to be safe.) The bike looks a LOT cleaner. But that's not interesting. What matters: It changed my entire cycling experience. I'm right handed, and the rear brake handle was on the right side of the handlebar -- so now that it was gone, the urge to brake went away. I regulated my speed according to my surroundings. I didn't brake. I way more free to just roll naturally, as I had one less knob or control to worry about. It was liberating.

Garry then extends this metaphor to software and product design:

When it comes to software and products of all kinds -- think about what removing a rear brake might do....Get rid of the things you don't need. Keep the things you do. Yes, you can add to the experience by subtracting.

Great advice from Garry that  also can be applied to what we do as communicators. 

One of the best, earliest pieces of advice I got on writing was to take your favorite sentence, the one that you spent the most time crafting and polishing, and chuck it. Why? Because chances are the only reason it's there in the first place is that you've spent so much time on it and you don't want to give it up. And although you may be really proud of it, it could be the one thing that's holding your piece back from really saying what you want it to say and being effective communication.

I've been thinking a lot lately about how university communications offices can "reboot" their operations. One way is to critically examine the various things you do and ask why you do them. If the answer comes back, "Well, that's the way we've always done it," then maybe it's time to consider dropping that function and finding something new.

Lose the rear brake. You may find it liberating as well.

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Filed under  //   communications   rebooting  

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